WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:14.160 This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,869 for Thursday the first of June 2023. 00:14.160 --> 00:18.320 Today's show is entitled 5 Minute War Game. 00:18.320 --> 00:21.280 It is part of the series' tabletop gaming. 00:21.280 --> 00:25.760 It is hosted by Clotoo and is about 14 minutes long. 00:25.760 --> 00:28.360 It carries a clean flag. 00:28.360 --> 00:33.320 The summary is I made up a game so I could play with my painted toy soldiers while waiting 00:33.320 --> 00:35.880 for code to compile. 00:35.880 --> 00:45.360 Hey everybody, this is Clotoo and I'm going to share a little game with you this episode 00:45.360 --> 00:52.200 because as I've said before, fairly recently on Hacker Public Radio, I've been painting 00:52.200 --> 00:54.320 little miniatures, little plastic miniatures. 00:54.320 --> 01:01.440 Like the ones that you use, you see people using D&D games on TV shows when you see 01:01.440 --> 01:04.200 D&D being played or maybe you play yourself. 01:04.200 --> 01:08.720 You've seen little miniatures, there are little plastic toy soldiers, sometimes they're 01:08.720 --> 01:14.520 fantasy themed, sometimes they're sort of historically militaristic themed, sometimes they're 01:14.520 --> 01:20.560 future sci-fi militaristic themed, there are little plastic miniatures and you paint 01:20.560 --> 01:26.120 them and it's a lot of fun and the end result is that you have a bunch of toy soldiers sitting 01:26.120 --> 01:32.920 around on desks and shelves and you love to look at them, you know, I do, I love looking 01:32.920 --> 01:37.840 at these things, sometimes I don't because I didn't paint them well and then I get sad. 01:37.840 --> 01:42.200 But a lot of times I do, I enjoy looking at them because I think maybe I did do a good 01:42.200 --> 01:47.480 job at painting that particular one or maybe it's at least passable. 01:47.560 --> 01:52.600 But you know, you like to sort of look at these things because you've spent time on them 01:52.600 --> 01:58.880 and on a good day, like if you've bought the right miniature, then they're really, really 01:58.880 --> 02:06.920 beautifully sculpted, that's kind of cool, like some artist somewhere has been laboring over, 02:06.920 --> 02:11.760 like creating this little figure, you know, so there are a lot of fun to look at. 02:11.760 --> 02:17.840 And then I'd like to kind of, I'd have them out on my desk while I'm at work or something 02:17.840 --> 02:22.400 and I'll glance down at them and sometimes, you know, like between projects or something, 02:22.400 --> 02:26.840 I'll kind of pick them up and look at them and if you hold them kind of close to your 02:26.840 --> 02:31.680 face then they look really big and so you can kind of pretend like that they're, you 02:31.680 --> 02:36.720 know, really huge in the frame, you know, like in a movie or something and you can kind of 02:36.720 --> 02:40.960 move them around and kind of visualize the battlefield around them or maybe they're on 02:41.040 --> 02:47.040 a spaceship or, you know, their explosions around or whatever, you know, it's fun and I was 02:47.040 --> 02:53.440 doing that a while ago and I thought there's got to be a way to capture the sort of 02:53.440 --> 02:58.960 glee that you get when you're, when you're just admiring the miniature and visualizing 02:59.920 --> 03:07.840 them in whatever imagined setting or seeing you have in mind in your imagination and the fun 03:07.920 --> 03:14.480 of their intended purpose, I think, which is, you know, games and I do play a couple of different 03:14.480 --> 03:22.160 war games with miniatures and I play in some tabletop RPG and use miniatures so they do get used 03:22.160 --> 03:29.200 for their intended purpose but those games, like whether it's tabletop RPG or like a war game 03:29.200 --> 03:37.200 or pandemic rain of kathulu which has little miniatures, those things are events that, you know, 03:37.280 --> 03:42.320 like you have to set them up, you have to get a table, you have to put out the game board or the 03:42.320 --> 03:51.200 play area, you have to shuffle cards or set up terrain, get some dye and, and it, it takes what 03:51.200 --> 03:56.880 45 minutes an hour, two hours, you know, like however long that sort of scenario takes you, 03:56.880 --> 04:02.000 it's a, it's a, it's a big deal and and sometimes you just don't have that time or sometimes 04:02.080 --> 04:09.600 you do but it's not until 7 o'clock in the evening and right now it's 10 a.m. and you think instead 04:09.600 --> 04:15.120 of just looking at these miniatures, I'd like to play with the miniatures so I came up with what I 04:15.120 --> 04:22.480 call scuffle whammer, it is a desk top, like a literal desktop, like on your desk at work, 04:22.480 --> 04:28.480 it's a desktop war game that takes about five minutes at the longest to play, there are also 04:28.560 --> 04:34.800 versions of it that can take three minutes or one minutes, one minute. Here's how to play. 04:36.080 --> 04:41.280 What you need, you need a couple of war game miniatures and those can be games, workshops, 04:42.080 --> 04:46.720 miniatures, they just sigma, they could be things that you've 3D printed, you can Lego mini 04:46.720 --> 04:52.160 figs, whatever you have on your desk that you like to look at and you want to play with, use those. 04:52.240 --> 04:58.880 You need two to three six-sided dice per miniature, so for each miniature you're using 04:58.880 --> 05:06.480 you need two or well one two or three six-sided dice per per miniature and then you need a 20 05:06.480 --> 05:11.680 by 20 centimeter play area, if you don't know what 20 centimeters is, just look at your hand, 05:11.680 --> 05:16.400 it's probably from your wrist to your fingertips, that's probably about 20 centimeters. 05:16.400 --> 05:21.200 It doesn't have to be precise, this is very flexible system, okay, so that's what you need. 05:21.200 --> 05:27.920 Miniatures dice and a small little corner of a surface, okay, so here's the setup. 05:27.920 --> 05:31.920 You place your miniatures, let's just assume you're using four miniatures for right now. 05:31.920 --> 05:38.080 You place your miniatures on your, in your play area, in any configuration that you want. 05:40.560 --> 05:45.680 You also decide during this step how those miniatures relate to one another. So for instance, 05:45.680 --> 05:52.880 I have some blue space marines and some aliens, so I'm going to just say that the aliens are on 05:53.840 --> 06:01.040 one team and the space marines are on another team. I could also say that they're all on their own 06:01.040 --> 06:05.600 team, like they're each individual agents with no relationship to one another at all, 06:05.600 --> 06:12.240 they've all converged in an area and realized that they have to fight each other. It's up to you, 06:12.320 --> 06:18.080 but I'm just going to say to keep things a little bit organized, I'll say that the alien is team A 06:18.080 --> 06:27.120 and the space marines are team B. Okay, next for a long game, place 3d6 by each miniature 06:28.080 --> 06:36.240 for a short game, so a long game is about five minutes. Short game is three minutes and a tiny game 06:36.320 --> 06:44.320 is one minute. So for a long game, you need 3d6, just set it, set next to each miniature, 06:45.040 --> 06:52.560 for a short game, go for 2d6 and for a really lightning fast game, go for 1d6. 06:53.440 --> 06:58.800 Finally, decide which miniatures is going to go first. You can either roll a die and like assign 06:58.800 --> 07:04.640 a number free. I don't do that. I just, I just say the one closest to me goes first and then I go 07:04.720 --> 07:12.960 sort of team by team. So if the one closest to me is a space marine, then okay, space marines go first 07:12.960 --> 07:18.240 and then then the aliens. If it happened to be an alien, then the aliens would go first. It really 07:18.240 --> 07:28.960 doesn't matter. Okay, so the turn order, the game itself is played very simply. You've got two 07:29.040 --> 07:36.800 types of actions that you can take on your turn. You can move or attack. You cannot do both in one 07:36.800 --> 07:43.360 turn, so you either have to move or attack to move. A miniature can move literally anywhere in the 07:43.360 --> 07:52.480 play area. They can move up to another miniature, entering the melee zone or they could move 07:52.480 --> 07:58.640 for instance behind an object. Let's say I happen to have a USB thumb drive sitting here on my desk. 07:58.720 --> 08:05.680 Well, maybe it moves up to that thumb drive and uses it as cover or here's my coffee cup 08:07.120 --> 08:14.480 and it's got a lid on it. So maybe this space marine moves up onto my coffee cup to get like a higher 08:14.480 --> 08:21.440 higher vantage point. You can grant modifiers as you see fit. So for instance, if it is hiding 08:21.520 --> 08:29.280 behind this USB thumb drive, well, maybe that's going to grant this miniature or rather impose a 08:29.280 --> 08:38.480 minus one to attacks against this miniature because it's got cover. Or maybe if another miniature 08:38.480 --> 08:44.320 jumps up onto my coffee cup, maybe it'll get a plus one to its attacks because it has a pretty good 08:44.960 --> 08:54.400 elevated vantage point. So that's movement and each miniature can do that on its turn and then 08:54.400 --> 08:59.840 then the turn ends. If it does move up to a coffee cup or behind the thumb drive or whatever, 08:59.840 --> 09:10.000 just be sure to bring its d6s along with it. The other option is to attack. So on your 09:10.000 --> 09:17.120 on a miniature's turn, it can also just attack another miniature. That's why knowing whether they're 09:17.120 --> 09:23.200 on teams or whether they're all every miniature for itself, you kind of need to know that. So in 09:23.200 --> 09:30.720 this case, they're on teams. So one of my space marines is just moved behind a thumb drive. So that's 09:30.720 --> 09:38.480 its turn but the other space marine hasn't gone yet. So maybe it'll go and it'll attack one of the 09:39.360 --> 09:46.560 aliens to make an attack. You take a d6 from that miniature's dice pool permanently. It's using 09:46.560 --> 09:56.480 up one of its dice and you roll it. When it's arranged attack, so like a gun or a crossbow or a 09:56.480 --> 10:07.760 magical spell from afar, you hit your target if you roll a four, five or six. It's pretty good 10:07.840 --> 10:12.800 chances. That's like a 50 50 chance of hitting your target. In this case, it actually did hit its 10:12.800 --> 10:22.480 target. It rolled the six. So its target, I'm going to take one of the targets d6s and put it out of the 10:22.480 --> 10:30.240 game. So it is down to 2 d6 now. Even though it hasn't even gotten to attack yet, it only has 2 d6 10:30.240 --> 10:37.440 in its dice pool. In other cases, if for instance, this alien that just got hit happens to be 10:37.600 --> 10:44.480 holding a sword. It can, well, it can't actually, but it, okay. So it can move up to this other 10:44.480 --> 10:50.480 miniatures, to this other miniature, entering the melee zone. It can't attack yet because it can only 10:50.480 --> 10:59.280 move or attack on its turn. But once it is able to attack, because it is in melee, it would hit 10:59.360 --> 11:07.040 on a roll of 3, 4, 5, or 6. So in other words, ranged attacks hit on 4, 5, or 6, 11:07.040 --> 11:15.840 melee hits on 3, 4, 5, or 6. As I say, there could be potentially modifiers that either help 11:15.840 --> 11:23.680 it or hinder it from making its from from from from meeting its target, but but on the die, 11:23.680 --> 11:32.320 4, 5, 6, for ranged, 3, 4, 5, 6, for melee. All damage is a penalty of one of one dice from your 11:32.320 --> 11:37.280 dice pool. So anytime you get hit, here's, so here's the other alien. It's going to target 11:37.920 --> 11:42.000 the space marine hiding behind that thumb drive. So I'm going to take one of its dice from its 11:42.000 --> 11:49.760 pool, roll it. Oh, and it rolled a six as well. So even with a penalty of a negative one 11:50.320 --> 11:57.040 because of the USB thumb drive cover, that's a hit against that space marine. So I take one 11:57.040 --> 12:03.760 die from the space marine dice pool and put it to the side. So we're down to basically everyone having 12:03.760 --> 12:10.480 two dice in their pool, whether or not they've actually made an attack. Play continues in that 12:10.480 --> 12:17.120 manner. You can move, you can attack when you take damage, you lose dice. Now eventually you're 12:17.200 --> 12:22.880 going to get a mini sure's going to get down to zero dice in its pool. Here's how to handle 12:22.880 --> 12:29.200 that. If you use up your last die with an attack, you're fine. You just can't attack anymore. 12:29.200 --> 12:33.280 You're done. You're out of ammo or whatever. And frankly, the game is probably going to end 12:33.280 --> 12:38.480 any minute now. If you take damage and you have no dice in your dice pool, though, your dead. 12:38.480 --> 12:46.800 If you take damage and that damage removes your last die, then your dead. The last 12:46.880 --> 12:54.560 miniature or miniatures left standing after everyone else after all dice has been removed from 12:54.560 --> 13:00.640 the play area. Those are the winners. In other words, if you're not dead at the end, then you've won. 13:00.640 --> 13:06.480 And sometimes that is more than one miniature. Sometimes it's a team of miniatures. Sometimes it's 13:06.480 --> 13:11.440 two members of an opposing team and maybe you want to come back later after lunch or something 13:11.520 --> 13:17.920 and have them do a showdown. Who knows? So this is obviously a really simple and really, 13:17.920 --> 13:25.040 really quick game. You can play lots of little scenarios like this. A lot of little, 13:25.040 --> 13:30.480 they're not even skirmishes. They're really are just scuffles. You can play them within five or three 13:30.480 --> 13:38.480 or literally one minute. It's super fast. It's almost not playing a game. It's almost just rolling 13:38.880 --> 13:43.040 but because there's the presence of these miniatures and because you're moving it around, 13:43.040 --> 13:48.240 your desk and maybe you are. Maybe you have brought in random objects that are lying around 13:48.240 --> 13:53.520 on your desk. I mean, I've got like a mobile phone. I've got a little tiny little USB hub. I 13:53.520 --> 13:59.920 got a USB thumb drive. I've got a glasses case. Like all of these things can become like part of the 13:59.920 --> 14:07.680 of the battlefield. And it makes for a really fun and quick and silly little war game just while you're 14:07.760 --> 14:12.640 waiting for something to compile. That's the game. I call it scuffle whammer. It is available 14:12.640 --> 14:19.280 online at itch.io for download or I mean, you can literally just play it based off of what I just 14:19.280 --> 14:24.400 said. You don't really need a download. Like the rules are pretty simple. You can move or attack 14:24.400 --> 14:29.680 a ranged attack hits on four five or six. A melee attack hits on three four five or six. 14:29.680 --> 14:35.360 Damage removes one die and attack removes one die. That's it. Those are the rules. It's a lot of fun. 14:35.360 --> 14:36.480 Try it. Thanks for listening. 15:05.360 --> 15:16.480 Today's show is released on our creative comments. Attribution for pointo international license.